Posted 6:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW TO ACHIEVE A WIN-WIN-WIN
FOR BLACK STUDENTS, OPS AND TAXPAYERS

Are you cringing over the low test scores in the Omaha Public Schools, published in The World-Herald today?

See how, for many of the neediest kids in Omaha, the test scores are going DOWN, even after the multimillion dollar bond issues and increased spending of the past decade or so directed at meeting their needs?

It's long past time to put to rest the bogus assumption that more spending on education produces better academic results. Wrong-o!

The new test scores sure show the Charles Dickens "It was the best of schools, it was the worst of schools" character of OPS. But therein lies a real opportunity for improving things for pupils, OPS and taxpayers. Consider:

The newspaper showed a chart with 64 elementary schools listed by their California Achievement Test scores last spring in reading, language and math in Grades 2, 5 and 8. Some of the top schools are doing very well, averaging above the 80th and 90th percentiles.

Look at Dundee Elementary, with 43% of its pupils from families whose incomes are low enough to qualify for free or subsidized lunch. Yet that school still scored in the 90th percentile on the CAT compared to pupils in other schools across the country. That is admirable. OPS should be applauded.

Of the top 32 schools on the chart, only four are doing worse than a statistical analysis of the poverty factor in those schools would suggest. In other words, only in only four of the top half of OPS grade schools are the kids doing worse than one would expect, given their demographics. The vast majority of the top half of grade schools in OPS are beating the odds. That's something to celebrate.

But in the BOTTOM half of the school roll in OPS, 22 out of 32 were doing worse than they should be.

That's the problem -- the major, major problem, and the reason Omaha has egg on its face before the nation. Omaha's African-American students, who mostly populate those troubled schools, score at or near the bottom of the whole country in another nationally-standardized test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So we have crummy scores in half of our schools, and minority kids are doing worse than they should be even if all other factors were equal, demographically-speaking. On its face, it looks like racial discrimination, for taxpayers are tolerating educational practices that are obviously and chronically negatively impacting African-Americans and other minorities in educational outcomes, compared to whites.

Can you say "major lawsuit"? Can you say "ruinous consent decree," similar to what happened in Kansas City, which caused a judge to nuke their public schools because of a problem that wasn't even as bad as this?

Note that these disappointing scores come despite the fact that most of the bottom 32 schools are "academy" schools, in which Nebraska taxpayers are pouring much more money, per-pupil. If spending levels had anything to do with educational quality, you'd certainly expect to see a better return than that on our investment. Once again, we can see that pouring good money after bad doesn't do a darn thing to help.

But there's a way out of this, as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Form a new private, nonprofit corporation. Put an educational leader of impeccable credentials at the helm -- City Councilman Franklin Thompson comes to mind. Allow that new corporation to manage the per-pupil spending in those 22 OPS schools on a long-term management contract with the Omaha Public Schools board. Pass through the tax funding for those kids straight to the new nonprofit. Declare an educational emergency that negates the union contract and supercede collective bargaining for employees of those 22 schools. Make sure to give Thompson, as the ad hoc superintendent, and the principals he puts in place, hiring and firing power. Most of the existing OPS staff would probably hire on, and salaries and benefits will no doubt be better if management could get out from under oppressive union rules. Cut the per-pupil spending in those 22 schools to the same as the OPS average, saving millions in taxpayer dollars right off the bat. Remember? More spending does NOT mean better academic results! It's a paradox, but if we set out to spend less, and do the simple things like delivering academic basics better because we can't AFFORD the more expensive things that are obviously screwing things up, the kids will be better off! You CAN get more for less!

2. Contract with an experienced private, nonprofit school management firm such as KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program, www.kipp.org). Allow them to put in place the simple, firm, effective curricular and operational changes that they have proven work very well for disadvantaged students at other schools all over the country. Examples: academic basics such as phonics for reading and computation for math, tangible incentive prizes for good grades and attendance, better discipline, longer school days and some Saturday sessions. If parents don't want to sign off on that, they should be allowed to put their kids in any private school in the city -- there are plenty of openings -- and the tuition is about one-third as much as OPS is now spending per pupil -- so we'd save beaucoup bucks that way, too.

3. Here's the beautiful part: Nebraska's NAEP test scores for African-American students would zoom high overnight, as if by magic, the very next year, and stay high. We would no longer be the bottom-feeders of the nation for our students of color. Omaha's economic development picture would brighten because we would be free of our current black eye -- the implication that we are a racist community because our minority students do so much worse in school than our Caucasian students. How would this happen, as soon as the 2010-2011 school year? Because we will have removed most of the low-scoring African-American pupils from the test pool in the public school setting, where we KNOW they don't do well, into a private school setting, where evidence from around the country shows that minority students do better. You remove the bottom-scoring one-third from a test pool, and what happens to the average? It zooms sky-high! Bottom line: minority kids not only will do better academically in the long run, but their scores in the meantime won't be counted against OPS, and in the long run will look much closer to what the other kids in OPS can do. OPS teachers will look like geniuses . . . and so will Nebraska taxpayers!

Labels: KIPP, long-term management contract for 22 worst-performing OPS schools, Omaha Public Schools racial achievement gap, solution

Posted 4:57 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Charters: 12/15 Best Schools Serving Poor in California;
KIPP Schools: Even Leftist Educators Concede Kids Do Better In Them;
So WHY Are Nebraskans Or Anybody Else Still Talking About Bill Ayers?!?

I reported several times this past month that the reason the University of Nebraska College of Education should never have invited unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers to speak at its big wingding is that he isn't really an educator. Can you spell L - O - S - E - R?!?!

His multi-million dollar "education" program that he and President-Elect Barack Obama both participated in, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was just another kind of . . . well . . . bomb. According to its own final report, published in 2003, it had "little impact on student outcomes." Total spent: $150 million. But it didn't help kids. Sheesh. See:

www.ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf

But the Ayers invitation / disinvitation is still making news in Nebraska. Why, oh why?

Note what the N.U. College of Education, the Education Committee of the Unicameral, the State Board of Education, and the Omaha Public Schools STILL don't seem to grasp:

CHARTER SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL CHOICE ARE THE ANSWER FOR POOR KIDS!

Comes now a Los Angeles Times story dated Nov. 11 by Mitchell Landsberg that reports that 12 of the top 15 public schools in California serving poor kids are charter schools. That's based on standardized test results, and poverty levels reflected by a minimum of 70% of the student body having low enough family incomes to be on free or reduced-price lunch programs.

How could this be? The charter school officials quoted said that the kids are motivated to succeed because the public schools they were in before were failing them. And distractions were at a minimum, because unlike those former public schools, the charter schools focused on math and language arts, and not all that social engineering stuff like Bill Ayers likes to teach.

Also note another new report that's out from education policy wonks Jeffrey Henig of Teachers College, Columbia University, and Kevin Welner, University of Colorado-Boulder -- both left-wing strongholds -- but these two concede that the charter schools and private schools run by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) are doing a better job with the same tough-to-teach disadvantaged students as the traditional public schools.

Detractors of KIPP say that they "cream" the best students from local low-income schools in order to look good on paper. But these left-wing wonks didn't find that. In fact, they said KIPP kids are more likely to have done WORSE in their former schools than average, and were more likely to be of color than Caucasian. Also, the wonks reported, if a student gets into KIPP and stays in KIPP, the student will have a better outcome, than if the student stays in the more-expensive traditional public school.

The only problems they cite are high student and teacher turnover, but those are problems overall in the low-income neighborhoods and nothing to do with KIPP per se.

Read about it on:

www.epicpolicy.org/publication/outcomes-of-KIPP-Schools

What don't we have in Nebraska?

Charter schools and KIPP schools.

We don't have Bill Ayers, either, which is a start. But let's hope the ed bigwigs begin to grasp some of these concepts soon, before we lose a whole 'nother generation to educational malpractice.

Labels: Bill Ayers, charter schools, KIPP

Posted 1:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Who SHOULD the N.U. Educators Invite to Speak?
Here Are Five Great School Reformers Who Deserve the Mike

The N.U. College of Education and Human Sciences leaders were not the brightest lights in the candelabra when they invited unrepentant terrorist William Ayers to be keynote speaker at the N.U. Teachers College's upcoming 100th anniversary celebration.

Now they have to come up with somebody else, quick. And it'd better be somebody good.

Considering that Nebraska has one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the nation, ideas for how to plug it might be a pretty focus for that speaker. Ayers and Obama proved totally impotent on that, even armed with $150 million of other people’s money to throw around in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which did nothing.

So who else could N.U. invite? Is there anybody out there who has proven how to help disadvantaged kids do better in school . . . without setting bombs, committing treason against the United States, or trying to kill anybody? Well, let’s see:

-- Another Chicagoan, only a REAL educational hero, Marva Collins. She started a private school for inner-city Chicago kids in 1975 with $5,000 of her own money. At the end of her first year, every single student tested at least five grade levels higher. Almost all of her students, who come from the lowest socioeconomic groups, manage to go on to college, including the Ivy League. Mrs. Collins has inner-city fourth-graders reading (and understanding!) Plato. And she speaks all over the country about how schools could cut the baloney, and start TEACHING again, to make a huge difference for kids. So she's pro-American, her educational style is very inexpensive, and she gets results. What a concept!

-- Former Chicago school superintendent Paul Vallas, who has acknowledged that the Obama-Ayers ed project in Chicago was an utter failure, is now trying to patch up the absolute mess that the lefties and Hurricane Katrina made of the New Orleans school system. He got there to find 97% African-American populations in the public schools, and 75% poor and on free or reduced-price lunch. What he has developed is so exciting and creative, it would be a slam-dunk to fix the failing schools within the Omaha Public Schools. Instead of a top-down, command-and-control structure like OPS now has, with no room for educational entrepreneurship, New Orleans is using a "Diverse Providers Strategy." There’s school choice, charter schools, magnet schools, plenty of freedom for principals of schools that are doing great or OK, and increasing focus and control over principals of schools that are still failing. There are tons of sharp young teachers from Teach For America, too – another fantastic school reform that’s in 1,000 schools across the country but not a single one in Nebraska. Why not get that going -- try what's working elsewhere? Again, what a concept!

-- Florida education commissioner Eric J. Smith is an expert in using quality curriculum to improve the academic achievement of all student groups, especially the disadvantaged. In 10 years, using back-to-the-basics curriculum, Florida has lifted the quality of its educational delivery so high that Florida Hispanic students now score higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than the mostly-white, overall, total student populations of 15 other states. And all it took was good curriculum?!? What a concept!

-- Lance Izumi is a California researcher who found that low-income students could still be high-achieving with inexpensive, cost-effective educational practices. Examples: learning to read with phonics, and concentrating on computation mastery to get ready for algebra instead of way-out “rainforest math” activities in grade school such as most public schools use today. His report, They Have Overcome: High-Poverty, High-Performing Schools in California, documented that there is no correlation between higher student achievement, and higher spending and higher teacher salaries. It's not the money; it's the curriculum and the expectations! We don’t need mountains of more money?!? What a concept!

-- Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are teachers who started the KIPP Academy (Knowledge is Power Program) in inner-city Houston in 1994, got funding from Doris and Don Fisher of Gap Inc., and by 2007, their inexpensive, common-sense methods have spread to 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving 16,000 students, almost all low-income and minorities. While only 20% from that sociodemographic group typically go on to college, among KIPP students, the percentage is 80%. Wow! Of course, we desperately need programs like KIPP in Nebraska, and don't have a single one. N.U. could pave the way by inviting them here to speak. What? Invite GOOD guys, who have succeeded in real life? Not washed-up, educationally bankrupt terrorists? Educators who've actually helped people, not hurt them, to come and speak and inspire? What a concept!!!

Labels: Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Dave Levin, Eric J. Smith, KIPP, Lance Izumi, Marva Collins, Mike Feinberg, Paul Vallas